Kip Mesirow, owner of Verdigris Copperworks, seen in 2008 with some of the light fixtures he made at his shop in Charlotte. / GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS

Written by

Paul Palladino

Free Press Staff Writer

After the famed California restaurant Chez Panisse was damaged in a fire March 8 a Vermonter was called in to fix it.

Charlotte artisan Kip Mesirow spent two weeks in mid-March leading the reconstruction of the Berkeley, Calif., restaurant, which he designed more than 40 years ago. The restaurant needed to replace its two porches which were damaged in the fire.

Chez Panisse is owned by renowned chef Alice Waters, and it focuses on using local and sustainable food providers.

Mesirow, 71, designed the the restaurant, which opened in 1971 and has served the Dalai Lama and former President Bill Clinton, according to books written about it.

“It was just a job in the beginning,” Mesirow said. “It’s hard to explain, but she (Alice) let me express myself through design and stuff like that. She’s been good for me that way. She let me express myself through my woodworking and my design and continued to let me do that. She’s a wonderful woman.”

Mesirow said he heard from friends about the fire at the restaurant, which also had a major fire in 1982, and he contacted Waters about the reconstruction. He said the design of the rebuild will not vary greatly from the original.

“I’m a different person,” Mesirow said. “It’ll be slightly different, but ostensibly the same. The porches aren’t any larger than they were so it’s going to have a similar aspect. Different detailing, different textures, different colors, but basically the same.”

Part of the rebuild will focus on the design relationship between the two porches.

“Originally, the front porch area was just a little balcony off the lower floor and then we enclosed it and put a roof on it,” Mesirow said. “Then she wanted to do the same thing for the upstairs so we actually had two individual looking porches. They had different textures on them, different roof designs and in the rebuild they’re going to be much more of a cohesive unit with the different sidings and different textures to incorporate it into one continuous unit as opposed to two broken ones.”

Mesirow and Waters have learned how to work together over their 40 plus years of collaboration.

“I had my hands around her throat a couple of times,” Mesirow said. “That’s a joke. Listening to her express what she would like the restaurant to look like is sort of difficult to interpret. She likes to use words like beautiful and romantic and stuff like that, but that’s really kind of hard to turn that into woodworking as you can imagine. We were able to communicate and talk over the years and we understand each other. It’s a lot easier now.”

On the restaurant’s website, Waters wrote the target date for reopening is early June.